How Free Should Speech Really Be?

Why “The Coddling of the American Mind,” a new documentary film on Substack, troubles me

Photo by Mercedes Mehling on Unsplash

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I believe it’s possible to be irritated by the worst excesses in college classrooms — identity politicking that’s easily ridiculed in “secret” videos or on Republican congressional committees — yet understand that youthful idealism isn’t killing free speech. It’s possible to loathe the canned DEI on-boarding programs many of us have had to click through yet still understand that “woke” is not a dirty word.

I say all this to underscore why I find myself on more than one side of the free-speech debate. I’ve long resisted knee-jerk canceling of books, authors, and speakers. I’d rather have an engaged discussion about hot-button topics than fearful silence. At the same time, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination are real. They’re deeply rooted in the way we experience the world. To deny that some voices have more privilege to speak than others is another form of canceling.

Which is why I’m disappointed by the new film The Coddling of the American Mind, touted as “the very first Substack Presents feature documentary.” In its favor, the film is thought-provoking and engaging to watch. I teach journalism, and I like contrarian views. Threats to free speech are much on my mind after Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard, so I paid a monthly subscription fee to stream this indie documentary — you can, too — just as I’d pay for a movie ticket.

It weaves among the personal stories of some very articulate students (or recent graduates) affected by the culture wars. I like their stories, but I came away troubled by the film’s undertone of moral panic and lack of counterpoints. It calls for open debate and less hand-holding of students but ends up piling on the current demon of the right: DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs.

WATCH: Official Trailer - "The Coddling of the American Mind" Movie

The Coddling of the American Mind is a high-energy riff on the 2018 book of the same name by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, a tipoff to its point of view. Lukianoff, an attorney, founded and runs FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). I admire the book, along with other work by social psychologist Haidt, particularly his The Righteous Mind: Why People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.¹

In their book, Lukianoff and Haidt identify “six explanatory threads” to account for changing campus culture, some of which are touched on in the film: big jumps in youth depression and anxiety, overprotective parenting, “the loss of free play,” burgeoning campus bureaucracies, “and an increasing passion for justice, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires.” But the very first thread they point to is “the rising political polarization and cross-party animosity of U.S. politics, which has led to rising hate crimes and harassment on campus.”

Films can’t cover all the ground “a very heady, nonfiction book packed with ideas and studies” does, as director

Ted Balaker

told me in a recent message. When I questioned the missing counterpoints, he said he and producer Courtney Moorehead Balaker of their production company Korchula Productions “had to focus and we had to somehow tell an entertaining story” in 90 minutes:

“We couldn’t make it too sweeping or we’d end up making something that wouldn't connect with viewers. And Americans are far more familiar with the pro-DEI side than they are with the Coddling argument. Few Americans have encountered personal stories like the ones our students told. Stories like theirs are extremely important, yet they’ve been largely overlooked, partly because the pro-DEI side dominates the discussion (especially on campus).”

I don’t like sweeping statements or binary thinking, either. I’m in academia, so of course I love evidence that may glaze the eyes of younger viewers. But as a topic, free speech is both divisive and confusing. If Americans have heard more about the “pro-DEI side,” it’s because the media loves a backlash. That doesn’t mean most Americans understand what DEI programs are.

More to the political point, alt-right media has stoked the culture wars, not just the progressive “great chill” Balaker refers to in recent Substack posts. There are many nuances to free speech, as he noted to me, but the film version of Coddling doubles down on arguments in his “Harvard and Sundance Share a Brain” — that is, an “intellectual monoculture” holds sway in academia and among elite media.²

Since I streamed this documentary a week ago, I’ve been wondering why the cognitive dissonance I feel seems so familiar. Then it hit me: it’s my own version of the “chill” of male criticism: that I better censor my thoughts.

And there it is: speech chilling, the very thing students at U.S. colleges like Kimi Katiti, Lucy Kross Wallace, and Saeed Malami discuss in the film. Self-doubts, wondering if you have a right to speak. “I was full of self-confidence when I was 18,” says Kimi, a recent graduate from Uganda. “But while I was in college, that disintegrated.” Saeed says “that self-silencing way put me in my own head.”

With my own criticisms here, I worried I’d be sticking my neck out, and that’s usually a sign somebody is pushing their authority on me. Ironically, it’s what the film claims happens to independent thinkers on campus.

The mix of TikTok-like fast cuts, animation, and personal narratives packs a wallop, but that approach undercuts the overall message about not relying on gut punches to form beliefs. The logo for the movie is a brain cradled in cupped hands. Animations show heads or eyes streaming with snaky light or gnashing teeth. Kimi, one of the most appealing of the student storytellers, recounts learning about microaggressions and how “I began to see myself through the lens of Black and woman”:

“I specifically remember the day, grey clouds outside, it was raining and I remember the moment I was like, is this true? Is what they're saying like real? Is this how the world works? And then I was like, I accepted it.”

Her questions are powerful, yet they come with lurid graphics that show her shocked face streaming with white tears, then sinister eyes glaring over a world suspended by puppet-master strings.

Of the five students featured, only two are American, and they’re both white women. The others are from Nigeria, Uganda, and India. They offer refreshing takes on identity, but they weren’t shaped by growing up in the U.S. Haidt and Lukianoff are the main experts; there are no interviews with anyone who might disagree with them. There’s just a brief look at the bad impact of social media; flashes of smirking Ben Shapiro; a 2016 cover of the Harvard Business Review with a blaring headline: “Why Diversity Programs Fail”; and many shots of students disrupting lecture halls.

Not until the halfway point does the film focus on the “three great untruths” from the book that address why young people now feel depressed and stressed:

1.     You are fragile.

2.     Always trust your feelings.

3.     Us vs. Them

I’m all for highlighting these cognitive distortions. Lucy, a Stanford student who refers to herself as an autistic person (not a “person with autism”) questions the loud protests about a Shapiro speech, but then backs off, telling herself she has white privilege: “it was morally wrong for me to disagree, even in my head.” Lukianoff himself, who bravely recounts his battle with depression when he was young, says, “it’s crazy what your brain can sort of convince you of.”

But despite the moving personal stories, I part company here: hate speech and related ideas can do real harm. (Kimi says she was “particularly traumatized by the shooting of Philando Castile” — for good reason.) And I’m far from sure about which “us” is shutting down free speech for Gen Zers like my son — or why accommodating those who have historically had no voice is a threat.

“This is a whole generation going off the rails,” Haidt says at one point, a sweeping statement to my ears. Lukianoff puts it this way:

“I think it's really important to have great sympathy for younger people today because they're just doing what older people are telling them. Like this idea that they're always in constant danger, that words will permanently harm them and that they're much more fragile than they actually are.”

Are young people so easily indoctrinated, though? Who’s underestimating them — and how might a DEI expert counter with a different story?

For instance, somebody like Alexis Griffith-Waye, formerly Director of Employee Learning and Development at Harvard and now Chief Learning Optimist of her own venture The Waye Forward. Last week, I participated in an online workshop led by Griffith-Waye, “Effective Communication for Challenging Situations,” one of many DEI programs offered by Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education. Of those I’ve attended, the chance to speak with other instructors and administrators about problems in class can feel like a godsend — and this one provided a welcome contrast to the panic presented in the Coddling film.

Griffith-Waye distinguishes between discriminatory and disruptive behavior, because they require different responses. The more common disruptive problems are domineering loudmouths and “failure to respect other’s opinions.” A few commonsense suggestions from her:

© Alexis Griffith-Waye; used with permission.

Now we’re closer to the Coddling message. Calls for empathy and avoiding offensive language may sound overprotective, until you’ve faced it yourself in a classroom. The point is to avoid the emotional reactions of “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn,” in Griffith-Waye’s terms — all of which are speech chillers.

In a later Zoom interview with me, Griffith-Waye, an acknowledged boomer and “Black female in the U.S.,” said sometimes she just wished for a solution “too simple” to work: the Golden Rule. Rubbing her neck with a sigh, she said, “But if everybody treated everybody the way they wanted to be treated, we would be done with this conversation.” Noting the complexity of today’s world, she added:

“I believe you can’t go forward if you’re looking in the rear-view mirror. But at the same time, I don’t want to forget the past, because I don’t want to relive it.”

Classroom discussions can be heated, annoyingly abstract or overly emotional. Even when they go off the rails — or very occasionally descend into shouting — that’s how people (and not just young ones) learn to express their ideas. This is me speaking now. DEI practices are not just a form of coddling; when done well, they can make a classroom feel safe enough for real debate. By this I don’t mean trigger warnings or protecting students from challenging ideas and provocative readings. I mean that listening to others is a skill that has to be modeled and practiced.

It requires empathy and cultural sensitivity, the hallmarks of many DEI programs. I’m no fan of ineffective lip-service to diversity and inclusion, especially in corporate bureaucracies, but without a few guidelines that emphasize civility rather than personal nastiness, learning doesn’t happen. Just look at the ranting on great swathes of digital media to see what speech is like in unsafe spaces and why it’s far from free.

For a far more pointed take-down of PC jargon, I recommend George Packer’s think piece from last spring in the Atlantic, “The Moral Case Against Equity Language.” He uses the Sierra Club’s 2021 “Equity Language Guide” as an example of the genre at nonprofits. This guide “discourages using the words stand, Americans, blind, and crazy,” Packer writes in his opening:

“The first two fail at inclusion, because not everyone can stand and not everyone living in this country is a citizen. The third and fourth, even as figures of speech (“Legislators are blind to climate change”), are insulting to the disabled.”

This is eye-rolling stuff (oops, I hope I haven’t offended anyone), but Packer underscores why the descent into abstract jargon masks real injustices or biases. “When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person,” he writes, “it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegitimate about laws, courts, and prisons.”

In the film, Lucy makes a related point about labeling herself as autistic. She also astutely describes feeling she can’t write fiction about anybody but white people like herself: “But then I would just be populating my stories with many versions of me, which sounds incredibly boring.”

Censoring the imagination in this way is one of the worst outcomes of speech chilling. Beyond the push for ideological purity, dropping vivid descriptions of the world we live in (the purview of good writers and journalists, Packer notes) let’s those in power off the hook. As Haidt says in the film, “[W]hen we suppress dissent, when we intimidate dissenters, we make ourselves stupid.”

So may this lively conversation continue. I have a fantasy reading list for a workshop that includes The Coddling of the American Mind (film or book); Packer’s “Moral Case” article; The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling (a podcast series by Megan Phelps-Roper of the Free press that does a fantastic job with both sides); Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” (his 2014 Atlantic article about redlining and racist housing policy); David Brooks’s recent book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen; James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” — and many other provocative works that address creativity, free speech, and its limits.

And thanks to Ted Balaker for taking on my questions. When I told him the film felt like “proselytizing,” he pushed back. I decided he just might be right.

1. Both Lukianoff and Haidt have Substack newsletters of their own: Lukianoff’s stack is

The Eternally Radical Idea

and Haidt’s is

After Babel

. Some of the students featured in the film are also on Substack, such as

Kimi Katiti

.

2. It’s not tough for me to believe indie filmmakers are being forced into political correctness by elite movie panels; I’ve heard versions of the same thing from documentary filmmakers I know. But while Balaker promotes his indie film rising from the ashes on Substack, those filmmakers put a different spin on the situation because of their progressive politics.